India: Congress Alleges Pressure to Remove Tweet on Amit Shah’s Remarks

The Congress on Thursday alleged that social media platform X (formerly Twitter) told them that the Union ministry of home affairs, through the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), and the IT ministry asked them to remove a video of home minister Amit Shah’s remarks on BR Ambedkar, saying that it violated Indian laws. The platform also told Congress that it had not taken any action on the post.

Congress’s Supriya Shrinate said the party’s official handle and party leaders, including herself, had received the email on Wednesday evening. “It allegedly says that we violated certain laws. I fail to understand which laws were violated,” she said. Congress did not give names of other leaders who have received the emails from X despite HT’s queries.

According to the email sent by twitter-legal@x.com on December 18 at 7:43 pm to the email address linked to the Congress’s official handle, the subject read ‘X Receipt of Correspondence’. “In the interest of transparency, we are writing to inform you that X has received a request from the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India regarding your X account, @INCIndia, that claims the following content violates the law(s) of India,” the email said, giving the link to the tweet.

The tweet in question had a 12-second clip of Shah’s speech delivered in Rajya Sabha on December 17 at 7:45 pm, in which the Union minister said in Hindi, “Sir, these days, it is fashionable to say Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar. If God’s name had been taken this many times, they would have reached heaven for seven lives/births.”

HT compared the clip with the 1 hour 32 minute and two-second-long video of Shah’s speech available on the official Sansad TV’s YouTube channel and found that the clip had not been altered or edited in any way. Amit Shah’s remarks were delivered in Rajya Sabha and have not been expunged by the chairperson (the vice president). The verbatim transcript of Amit Shah’s remarks (which match the clip posted by Congress) is available on the official website of Rajya Sabha, as is the video on the official YouTube channel.

The text of Congress’s tweet, in Hindi, after transcribing Amit Shah’s remarks, read, “Amit Shah has said something very disgusting. This shows that the BJP and RSS leaders have a lot of hatred for Baba Saheb Ambedkar. The hatred is such that they are even irritated by his name. These are the same people whose ancestors used to burn the effigies of Baba Saheb, who themselves used to talk about changing the constitution given by Baba Saheb. When the public taught them a lesson, now they have become irritated with those who take the name of Baba Saheb. Shameful! Amit Shah should apologize to the country for this.”

X, in its email, said, “We have not taken any action on the reported content at this time as a result of this request.”

While Shrinate, in her press conference, alleged that MHA and the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) had written to X to get the tweets taken down, HT has learnt that MeitY has not sent any blocking order in this matter to X. MeitY is empowered to send blocking orders under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act for six reasons related to national security and public order.

The only law then available to I4C to send such a notice is Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act, but such a notice must rely on other laws to establish the illegality of the content in question, Nikhil Narendran, advocate, explained. HT has asked I4C for details of the law(s) being violated by this tweet. HT has also reached out to X for more information.

Also See: FIR Against Rahul Gandhi: Congress Slams BJP Tactics

In March, the MHA had notified I4C as the agency that could send notices under Section 79(3)(b) “to notify the instances of information, data or communication link residing in or connected to a computer resource controlled by the intermediary being used to commit the unlawful act”.

The question then is – was the tweet by the official Congress handle illegal?

“Prima facie, there does not appear to be any illegality in this tweet,” Narendran said.

In February, HT had reported that for legal experts this provision is legally ambiguous, and has no safeguards (such as a review committee or giving the originator an opportunity to be heard) unlike the Section 69A blocking process. “Section 79(3)(b) erects a blocking process separate from Section 69A with a much lower threshold for issuing takedown notices and grants power to a much larger swathe of ministries, departments and law enforcement agencies,” Pavit Singh Katoch, general counsel at Inshorts, had told HT at that time.

Rakesh Maheshwari, former group coordinator of MeitY’s cyber laws division, said, “As envisaged in rule 3(1)(d) of IT Rules, 2021, the power to issue section 79(3)(b) takedown notices should be exercised with due diligence and with certain checks and balances. Ideally, only an appropriate government or its authorised agency, which is authorised to enforce the instant/specific law being violated, should send notices under this section.”

This is not the first time that I4C has tried to get content related to Shah removed or flagged for being illegal. Amid general elections, in May, at the recommendation of I4C, MeitY had ordered X (formerly Twitter) to block the official account of Jharkhand Congress for tweeting a doctored video of Shah.

The final blocking order, passed on May 2, was a temporary blocking order under which the @INCJharkhand account was to remain blocked in India only until the end of elections. The account, however, remains blocked even today.

This was the first time that the Section 69A of the Information Technology Act was used to block a political party’s social media account, that too during an ongoing general election, a fact that had been discussed by the blocking committee in May as well. At the time, HT had reported that the Section 69A blocking committee members had discussed whether this could violate the Model Code of Conduct; if only the tweet or the entire account should be blocked; and if there was any direct correlation between the virality of the doctored video and the Jharkhand Congress account.

In contrast, on November 19, the eve of the Maharashtra assembly polls, the BJP’s official Twitter handle had posted a series of four voice notes that were AI-generated (deepfake voice notes) and attempted to implicate NCP-SP’s Supriya Sule in a 2018 Bitcoin fraud. Despite being labelled as fakes by fact checkers such as Boom and Newschecker, no suo moto action was taken against these tweets by either the ECI, the state election commission or the Maharashtra Police.

This news is sourced from Hindustan Times and is intended for informational purposes only.